I was talking to my teen-aged nephew Alex about how we both remember the answers to tests by visualizing the place where we read them in the book. I know a lot of people are like that, but I think there’s something genetic about the way we both do it. Alex’s father doesn’t really think that way, but his grandfather does. I’m thinking maybe it’s a recessive trait.

My sister and I were staring at the bloody head of John the Baptist at that Russian icon exhibit back in December. So, we’re both gawking at this gruesome image, nodding our heads, saying, “huh, huh, coool,” like we’re Beavis and Butthead, and she says to me, “It reminds me of that awesome picture we saw at that art exhibit a few years ago.”

My memory failed me, because I couldn’t bring up the image. But I remembered exactly where we were standing in the exhibit, and the path we took around the other paintings to get to this one in the corner that just floored us, and we stood gawking just like we did last month at John’s noggin. Just so you can get an idea of what we were seeing, the painting was Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Anyway, I was talking before about Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, a book which takes journeys from South America to San Francisco to North Carolina and Georgia, to Africa to England, back to South America and San Francisco. Because my spatial memories lend themselves to geography, I find that this book is inextricably linked in my mind to Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, which also takes an important trip from South America to San Francisco.

Ah, San Francisco. I think it’s time we went back there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 11:00 pm and is filed under US and Canada, losing my religion, meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.